Actor as Citizen of the World

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Only a secure citizen would do what Garry Davis did 62 years ago. A onetime Broadway actor (he understudied Danny Kaye) and B-17 pilot, Mr. Davis showed up in Paris in 1948, renounced his US citizenship, and declared himself “World Citizen No. 1.”

Those were heady times. Revulsion with war was widespread. Davis himself had been horrified to learn that his plane’s bombs fell on civilians in Brandenburg, Germany, during one run. Then there was the A-bomb. If ever there was a one-world moment, the late 1940s would have been it.

Sympathizers smuggled Davis into a United Nations session in Paris where the onetime actor broke up the proceedings by declaring: “I interrupt in the name of the people of Earth not represented here.”

That night, he led a rally of 20,000 displaced persons in Paris. The UN Declaration on Human Rights was enacted the next day.

The bombs he unleashed turned him against nationalism, he says. The acting led him to the role of a lifetime: World Citizen No. 1.